Our Soul's Serenade
by AllanaDancer
Summary: One thing is clear; the soul is a fragile thing. And maybe I had every right to fear him and even to hate him... but I didn't. I didn't know his story nor what it took to be him. In a world where there is little difference now between our side and his, I was sent back not to kill him, but to save him. He was our last hope that the worst of us could find redemption.
1. Chapter 1

**Authors note: Hello lovlies! I haven't written for a long time and I was sad to go over my old work and find that I was a poor writer lacking much of what I hope I have today. This is the first piece in my Voldemort series that I will be working on a lot over the next few months. Enjoy! [:**

**Disclaimer: The amazing Harry Potter Universe belongs only to the great and inspiring J.K Rowling! I profit nothing and I own nothing that you recognize. My imagination only builds off of hers and these stories mean no harm- they are only for the simple entertainment of others. Any infringement of rights is purely unintentional.**

* * *

_"Always love your enemies" _

_Within love there waits a saving hope and from that hope the worst of us can find our redemption. _

* * *

The soul is a fragile thing. Like glass, once you damage it you cannot stop the splintering. The smallest touch, a shudder of the earth, the resounding impact of a battle… anything can break it. Sometimes, the shattered pieces are so small you cannot see them. The sharp slivers are left hiding until the unsuspecting victim is already bleeding. This, I think, is the only way I can explain the return of one of the Darkest Wizards of all time. His soul was fragile even before he tore it apart and because fate is both cruel and misunderstood, his second death was not death at all. Just as a soul is like glass, a horcrux is like the ancient Greek Lernaean Hydra and every time one head is cut of two grow in its place.

The funny thing is, I had every right to fear him. Hate him, even... Though every fiber of my being rebels that thought. I was raised to sympathize, emphasize, and keep an open mind and an open heart. I could hate everything he had done, and I did, but how could I _hate_ somebody I didn't know or even _understand_? Maybe it was a flaw in my logic... in my character. Isn't someone who's good supposed to despise somebody who isn't?

I suppose that's just it though, how can we really and truely determine if a person is good? I've never believed a person can be defined by their actions, I think they can only be defined by their thoughts, their feelings, and their intentions. You can know someone has done something terrible and when it impacts you, you can choose to hate them... but no matter how terrible what they did was you- just by knowing they've done it- cannot understand what was behind it.

There is an endless amount of feelings, thoughts, intentions, consequences, and reasons on top of fears and hopes on top of a past and a future, and this whole pile of humanity is hiding behind every single action we've ever made and ever will make. We can't ever pretend to understand what it took for somebody to do anything; we don't know the deepest lines of their story or what words are added to it with every move.

When I looked at the surface of his story, the little bits that told me only of a far perspective on his life, I saw a little boy who had never known _love_ and who in his _fear_, was just as _human_ as any of us. Maybe I'm not the only one who could see this. The third Wizarding War has not yet taken that from us all- the hope that maybe... Just maybe, there is hope for even the worst of us. In that way, our last resort was a hopeless hope for hope.

But you see, time travel is not taken lightly. It is a long walk and every step is littered with camouflaged butterflies under your foot like muggle mines. We've been fighting for six years now and it really is our last and worst chance at survival and redemption. There is little difference now between our side and his; we'd all lost sight of what we're fighting for and I had nothing left.

So yes, I had every right to fear and to hate Tom Riddle... But I didn't. This may make me the worst person for an entire world to rely on, but then again… it may have made me perfect. Perfect, because I was not sent back to kill him. I was sent to _save_ him.


	2. Ready

**Authors note: Hello lovlies! **

**Disclaimer: The amazing Harry Potter Universe belongs only to the great and inspiring J.K Rowling! I profit nothing and I own nothing that you recognize. My imagination only builds off of hers and these stories mean no harm- they are only for the simple entertainment of others. Any infringement of rights is purely unintentional.**

* * *

_"Always love your enemies" _

_Within love there waits a saving hope and from that hope the worst of us can find our redemption. _

* * *

_Summer 2029_

_It's not hard to remember every single little fact. I've reviewed every clue in my mind every day since the war started, contemplating all the ways it could have been stopped. I was barely fourteen when he came back. It's so easy now to see how it all happened… but at the time none of us could have imagined. It started out as it always does; with whispers._

_I suppose the very first sign- so tiny most have yet to realize it- was the theft of copper cauldrons which were well above the standard size from Potage's cauldron shop. Next, there was scattered reports of dug up graves, the odd claims were blamed on a simple increase in grave theft- a result of a mass of desperate once-high-and-mighty Death Eaters who had recently been released from Azkaban for fairly insignificant crimes and who had lost their wealth in the trials. Even when Gringotts was robbed a short time later, the Ministry didn't connect the dots. _

_Apparently Voldemort wasn't the only one capable of creating a horcrux. The few major death eaters who had horcruxes had either left distant relatives with vague instructions to bury their bodies in unmarked graves with the object that held the piece of their soul or to put it in Gringotts under a muggle name. As the magical world grew more comfortable with the idea of peace, the released Death Eaters gathered and stole the horcruxes back- reincarnating the others one by one. We're not sure how or who found Voldemort's second accidental horcrux, but we know he returned the summer before my fourth year at Hogwarts. My Herbology professor and family friend Neville Longbottom had been on holiday with his wife Hannah when he tried a funny drink from a stranger. We didn't realize until well into the war that it had not been a strong alcohol that led him for forget the night where he somehow obtained a large gash on his forearm, but a potion that drugged him and allowed him to be led to a Death Eater gathering where his blood was used to bring Voldemort back to life before his memory was wiped._

_Nothing more serious was recognized until a group of Wizards on their way home from a Quidditch game spotted what looked like Inferi. The Death eaters had begun building their army. This was the first major clue that Dark Magic was being practiced once more. As investigations increased, the various departments of the Ministry slowly discovered more. Wealthy families who had paid their way out of joining the Death Eaters in the First and Second Wizarding Wars were being blackmailed, forced to sponsor an unknown cause. That cause was of course the funding of Death Eaters. _

_After that, the Ministry was attacked. It was my father who realized that the sloppy attack performed by wizards under the imperious curse had not been a true attack at all. The Death Eaters were testing us, sending their probes into defenses to see just how prepared we were for what they were planning. _

_At one point, a large group of them was caught. Very large… how could we have know there were so many more or that they were a decoy? The world took a breath; we thought we'd stopped it before it started. Trials were the only negative news-worth events after that for just long enough that people were no longer on edge or even as cautious. _

_Soon, my Uncle- who had been one of the many who disappeared- was found. He was different; whatever they'd done to him had traumatized and changed him. He seemed done with his adventurous life in Romania; we thought he wanted to settle. As respected a family in the majority of our culture, he easily acquired a position at Hogwarts as Hagrid's assistant as Keeper of Grounds and Professor for Care of Magical Creatures. He wasn't the only one to return a changed person, many recognizable people were found and they all seemed so determined to settle into positions that distracted them from bad memories and allowed them to serve the public. _

_We were such fools. People were so happy to have avoided a war and found their loved ones…. we really were blind. The imperious victims had no difficulty infiltrating the four major establishments of the Magical World in British society; the Ministry of Magic, St. Mungos, Diagon Alley, and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I do not know how many people died the night that each were simultaneously attacked with a force unknown to even the survivors of the last wars. I do know that I was at the school when it happened. I lost both my Brothers that night and their remains would burn with Hogwarts ruins forever in the flames of __Gubraithian fire._

_The world changed forever in that moment. It will never be the same again. The war has reached almost every continent, impacting both the magical and muggle worlds alike. They're saying that this is the end of our kind, that by the end of the year we will have extinguished ourselves to the point of extension. Sometimes I look back when I was young and living in a different world and realize 90% of the faceless old neighbors, fellow students, shop-owners, and strangers on the street are probably dead now. They're all gone, so many people I've fought beside and against. Most painfully of all; I have lost my brothers James and Albus, my grandfather Arthur and grandmother Molly, my cousin Melanie Dursley, my Aunts Fleur, Audrey, and Angela Weasley, and Uncles Bill and George Weasley, my cousins Victorie and Fred, Dominique, and Hugo Weasley, my cousin's and I's childhood friends Lysander Scamander, Soni Jordan, Hestia Smith, and Blaine Cattermole, Luna and Rolf Scamander, all of my Hogwarts Professors, my Aunt Fluer's sister Gabrielle Belby and my best friend Laci Belby._

_I do not know where my Uncle Ron, Aunt Hermione, my cousin Molly, my Dad or my Mom is or if they are alive. I know my Uncle Percy is in hiding in Australia with my cousin Louis, Lucy, Roxanne, and Teddy and Victorie Lupin's son Aurie. My Uncle Charlie was last seen back in Romania with my cousin Rose, Scorpious Malfoy, Lorcan Scamander, and Malfoy's cousin Demetri Greengrass where they are working on what we in Britain have already given up; a way to win. I wonder what there's left to win… our freedom, sure, but for what cost? The only one with me is my god brother Teddy but he is no longer the person of my childhood and is more a stranger then the men and women who stand beside me on the battlefield. _

_I suppose none of us are the same. How could we be? At first it was so much more clear- my side vs. theirs, good and evil, black and white. Somewhere along the line the colors blurred together. We were no longer two lines of fighters who knew what we were fighting for and standing across from each other on opposing lines. We mixed and weaved together until we were nothing but a mass of broken people who didn't know where to point their wand or why to even bother. It used to be such a shock, seeing what Death Eaters were capable of. All of us have now done that and more. People don't think there is any way to recover from this reality. _

_How strange it is to look back at all of this and still know that I do not hate him. Voldemort, Tom Riddle, You-Know-Who, the Dark Lord…for somebody who is called He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, he is known by more names then most. I have a burning and consuming hate for this world, this war, my grief, my weakness, my wand, the death, the things I've done, the fighting… but I cannot hate a living being. Hate in that way is to accept this life; hate is to abandon and destroy my memories, my childhood, my innocence, my beliefs, my hope, and any chance at saving myself- much less anyone else. _

_Six years of this and we have finally reached the conclusion that we will not win by fighting. _

_Even survival in its most basic heart-beating lungs-breathing form will ultimately lead to the inevitable doom of our kind. We will have everything taken from us, we will be tortured, and we will be killed or we will continue to change and break and compromise and push morals and character and mortality until we are all the same, have no reason to continue, and nothing is left. The acute truth of this is one of the only shreds of clarity I have left. _

_And so we are here. My only chance at a purpose that does not lead to the same end is a mission that may be impossible; attempt to save the man who flicked the first domino in this falling line of humanity. _

_It took four years of extensive research and complicated enchantments for them to create the new line of devices that would take us back in time. There were rumors that it was actually a series of missions- that our leaders were so desperate that we were willing to accept any change over our reality that could not get worse- and that each of us who had been chosen would have different paths back into time to alter history as we knew it in any way we could. I wasn't sure if it was true but I knew that my mission was major. It wasn't just a hope to stop this war from ever happening, to save the one's we'd lost, or to ensure our survival. It was what many of us saw as our only chance to prove that we could change. _

_After all, we had done many things that could be seen just as horrible. He wasn't just considered the worst of us anymore, he was considered the living image of where we were headed… what we would become. Going back in time was meeting him as he stepped on to the path that would lead him so far into the dark. It would be seeing him as the equivalent of what we were now. If he could be stopped, pulled back into where he surely belonged, maybe none of us would have the chance to follow him. Maybe all of us could be redeemed. _

"Potter?" I looked up from my writing, snapping the book shut with more force then I'd intended and involuntarily clutching my wand tighter. Six years of war leaves a person on edge.

"Yes?" I replied moving my gaze to the wizard in the opening of my tent and trying to loosen the stiff grip on my wand. His name was Smith, Bradley Smith. I don't know him very well, but he had a kind face that currently looked more nervous then mine.

"It's time to head out. Are you ready?" I brushed my hair out of my face and stood, stuffing the journal into the trunk at the base of my table before clicking it shut, shrinking it, and placing it in the pocket of my robe. This was done in less than a minute- another side-effect of living on the run for so long.

I sighed. We were off to the remains of what once was Hogwarts, I was to use the time-turner in the Forbidden Forest. I considered his question for a secong longer; Was I ready to once again see my old school as rubble and ash? The place where James, Albus, Melanie, Fred, and Domonique had all died? The place where I had nearly died and was left with scars up my arm that still burned? Was I ready to travel 81 years into the past and try to convince Lord Voldemort not to do all he had done? Was I ready to possibly abandon the chance of ever seeing any of my family again? Was I ready to have an entire world relying on the results of my actions? Leave every thing I had ever known behind?

"Yes." I responded firmly, "I'm ready."


End file.
